Mediterranean Garden Society
Mediterranean Garden Society
Fashions
by Caroline Harbouri
Photographs by Lucinda Willan and Yvonne Barton
Photographs to illustrate the article published in The Mediterranean Garden No. 117, July 2024
The photo at the top of this page shows Cercis siliquastrum at Sparoza (photo Lucinda Willan)
Caroline Harbouri writes: Readers are, if you come to think of it, at the mercy of publishers. It is they who decide which books remain in print and are thus available to us. Unless we seek out shops that deal in second-hand books or specialist websites, our choice is in large part limited by literary fashion. So too with plants: it is nurserymen or, more usually these days, large commercial garden centres who decide which plants to offer for sale and in doing so create fashions. Sadly most of them all stock the same things, mass-produced (for Europeans) in Holland or Italy.
Moreover, most irritatingly, even if mediterranean gardeners do find suitable plants, garden centres have the habit of selling them in full, forced bloom in late spring or early summer. Do they think that gardeners are infants, wanting only what is brightly coloured? So what is the gardener to do? Buy the desired plant when it is available, promptly cut off all its flowers and attempt to keep it going in a pot through the summer until the planting season arrives in autumn? But this isn’t always feasible. “Oh my ears and whiskers,” as the White Rabbit said in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
However, there are honourable exceptions: nurserymen who propagate and raise their own plants, often different from those in vogue and on sale at garden centres, and often available throughout the year rather than only in spring. Theirs are the nurseries whose names gardeners pass on eagerly to one another. In the Sundries section of TMG 115 Mike Evans wrote of the pressures forcing specialist nurseries in Southern California out of business; may those elsewhere continue to prosper. We need them.
These thoughts led me to consider fashions in plants. I doubt that many gardeners in England today plant the bilious-looking so-called spotted laurel (Aucuba japonica) or the monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana). The monkey puzzle must once have had a certain degree of popularity in Greece too, for although I’ve never seen one in the Athens area I’ve noticed large old specimens on islands such as Zakynthos and Crete. (A tall one in Crete, just outside Hania on the road to Souda, is partially redeemed by serving as support for a very copious Campsis grandiflora.) The once ubiquitous aspidistra no longer features among the house plants that people grow. I don’t in the least regret the falling out of fashion of any of these plants – although I admit to a sneaking sympathy for the aspidistra’s ability to withstand all manner of maltreatment, hence its common name, the cast-iron plant. I certainly heartily wish that the fashion in Greece for dwarf conifers, particularly those with so-called ‘golden’ foliage, had never existed.
Yet, by contrast, there are plants now utterly unfashionable in Greece which I feel are unjustly ignored. Today one usually sees them only in old gardens and old, long-established parks. They are rarely offered for sale. Three such plants of which I’m rather fond come to mind.
Cestrum x cultum, a cross between Cestrum elegans and C. parqui growing at Sparoza
The first is a cestrum, now I believe called Cestrum elegans although I tend to think of it by its old name, Cestrum purpureum. It is not that the plant isn’t elegant in its own way with its narrow, evergreen, dark green leaves and clusters of equally narrow tubular flowers, yet somehow their colour is for me the plant’s salient feature. I can’t immediately think of any other plant whose flowers are just this shade of dull purple. By dull I don’t of course mean boring bur rather muted – a quiet colour, not bright or brilliant. There is something a bit old-fashioned about this shade of purple: one might think of a Victorian lady in half-mourning. Yet there is nothing sad about it. After Cestrum nocturnum with its powerful, sweet nighttime scent released in curious pulses, this is my favourite cestrum.
I am surprised that so few gardeners grow it today (in Greece, at any rate). For it is a robust shrub with a pleasantly arching habit, reaching about two metres in height, which, once established, demands little if any water. There is a specimen in an old bit of municipal planting not far from my house which holds its own well without receiving any water in summer. In a prolonged heat wave (temperatures above 40° C) it may shed some of its leaves but not enough to spoil its general appearance.
My second plant is a rose to which I have never been able to put a name. I think of it as ‘the old Kifissia rose’ since I first came across it in gardens in Kifissia (a suburb about 15km north of Athens), including in our own. It is a large, untidy rambler with a profusion of small and very pretty pale pink flowers, semi-double, in spring. It is mercilessly thorny (much worse than ‘Mermaid’): when I weeded near it or – even worse – attempted to cut it back a bit I always ended up with my arms scratched and bleeding in spite of wearing gloves and long sleeves. But I forgave its thorniness. By happy accident I planted near it Kolkwitzia amabilis and Clematis montana, both of them the same shade of pale pink as the rose, flowering at the same time and complementing each other with their very different shapes, sizes and habits. The kolkwitzia and the clematis were watered regularly, the rose never. We once employed a man to prune the vine that covered a pergola running about half the length of the garden who clearly thought this rose should be consigned to the past. He eyed its messy form, at that season of course not in bloom, and asked “Want me to get rid of that rubbish for you?” “No”, we howled in unison…
Justicia adhatoda
My third unfashionable plant is Justicia adhatoda, native to the Indian subcontinent and Indo-China, I wonder when it first arrived in Greece. At any rate it was once widely planted in parks but is almost never seen in the gardens of today. Yet if one wanted a large, unassuming but reasonably decorative white-flowered shrub one could do a lot worse than this justicia. Like Cestrum elegans it is evergreen. It doesn’t mind the brief frosts that occasionally occur in the winter months in Athens – though there were none last winter.
As one might expect from a member of the Acanthaceae family, its lipped white flowers, progressively opening, are borne in rounded green spikes. Its large lance-shaped leaves, of a clear, lightish green, are not tough or leathery and look far too delicate for the plant to be able to withstand drought. But looks can be deceptive. At the height of summer the leaves do indeed droop so that the plant appears to be terminally wilting and on the point of expiring, yet as soon as the first rains of autumn arrive it perks up again within a couple of days and continues unscathed. I presume that by hanging down its leaves in this way the plant reduces their surface area exposed to the blazing sun; whatever the mechanism, Justicia adhatoda is thoroughly drought-resistant.
I’d love to see my three old-fashioned plants grown more widely.
Laurus nobilis (photo Yvonne Barton)
There are however some plants in old gardens that have never fallen out of favour. Foremost among these is the bay tree, Laurus nobilis, in fact a tree-sized shrub. Apart from the culinary use we make of its aromatic leaves, the bay is attractive for its creamy yellow flowers and the black berries that follow them. No one ever waters a bay tree. In our garden I always felt that the old specimen planted against a wall gave good cover for birds. Moreover it is a plant with a distinguished history going back to antiquity. But did the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, really chew laurel leaves before uttering her prophecies? I’ve often wondered – sclerophyllous leaves don’t to me seem very chewable.
Myrtus communis
Myrtle (Myrtus communis) with its white flowers and purple-black berries also features in old parks and gardens, as well as oleanders (Nerium oleander), usually either pink or white. Another of the old shrubs that are still often grown is Pittosporum tobira, called in Greek angeliki, perhaps because of the angelic, heavenly scent of its creamy flowers which yellow as they age like old parchment. Old specimens are clipped to form a rounded, umbrella-like shape.
Pittosporum tobira in Granada
Pittosporum tobira flowering at Sparoza
Then there are various flowering trees and fruit trees. Of the former, the Judas tree (Cercis siliquastrum) is probably the most common. Among the latter, as well as the pomegranate, the loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) features prominently.
Punica granatum fruit
In TMG 116 Erika Mayr sang the praises of the loquat from a beekeeper’s point of view. But every aspect of this small evergreen tree is attractive. To begin with it has a naturally shapely form. Its long, slightly corrugated dark green leathery leaves are downy when young and have pale undersides. Its bee-attracting clusters of brownish-cream flowers are pretty and the tree looks lovely when covered with its small, round, orange fruits – before, that is, they have all been picked and eaten.
Eriobotrya japonica (photo Yvonne Barton)
A tree, incidentally, that I’d like to see grown more often is Melia azedarach, the bead tree or Persian lilac. Its pale mauve flowers are pretty enough but it is in winter when the tree is leafless that its real beauty shows. For the round, marble-sized, pale brown fruits remain on the tree all winter long, gradually becoming paler, and to see them silhouetted against the clear blue sky of a Mediterranean December is one of life’s small pleasures.
Melia azedarach
What all these trees and shrubs have in common is that they tolerate drought. When old gardens and parks were planted the water supply was often uncertain. As a result, a species’ ability to withstand the dryness of summer and look after itself was an important criterion in planting choices. Even in the National Garden of Athens, formerly the Royal Garden, which did have its own water supply (dating to the time of Peisistratos in the 6th century BC) many of the old drought-tolerant species were planted.
Cercis siliquastrum
After the Second World War a connection to the mains water supply steadily became more widespread in Attica. Gardeners began to forsake the old frugal ways in favour of water-demanding plantings based on more temperate-climate models – including lush green lawns. In the 1990s, however, after a couple of years of drought, metred water became more expensive, with the cost per cubic metre increasing steeply according to the level of consumption. This led many people to drill boreholes, tapping blithely into underground aquifers to water their gardens as if there was no tomorrow.
But of course there was a tomorrow. Slowly at first, then with increasing urgency, we started to recognise that the climate is changing and that the change has become critical. If we didn’t already know that water is a precious resource and that aquifers are not inexhaustible we now began to realise it. Some predictions indicate that the climate of the northern littoral of the Mediterranean will come to resemble that of North Africa, with the vegetation changing accordingly.
Athens has always had long hot, dry summers with very little atmospheric humidity - if they are to become hotter and drier, gardens will necessarily change too. If what we are seeing is a long-term reduction in annual rainfall, then we certainly need to think about the extent to which the plants in our gardens require watering. To her great credit, Sally Razelou for many years pioneered at Sparoza the idea of climate-compatible, waterwise gardening (just as Heidi Gildemeister did in her garden on Mallorca), but even at Sparoza plantings are likely to change somewhat in the coming years.
I can’t help thinking that, regardless of fashions, we have much to learn from those old Greek parks and gardens,
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